You’ve Just Been Watching

“The people who work at Ward live in little flat yellow houses on stilts that look like chicken-houses. They seem mean and flimsy on the sides of the hills and at the bottom of the hollow, in contrast to the magnificent mountains wooded now with the forests of mid-June. Between those round and rich-foliaged hills, through the middle of the mining settlement, runs a road with, on one side of it, a long row of some obsolete kind of coal-cars turned upside down and, on the other, a meagre trickle of a creek, with bare yellow banks, half-dry yellow stones, yellowing rusty tin cans and the rustling axles and wheels of old coal-cars. There are eight hundred or so families at Ward, two or three in most of the houses and eight or ten children in most families. And they are as much prisoners, as much at the mercy of the owners of their houses and land, as if they did actually live in a chicken-yard with a high chicken-wire fence around them." Noted intellectual Edmund Wilson wrote these li...